RPPM Trinket Change

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I posted this in the Warlock Trinket forum, but it's relevant to all DPS regarding your RPPM trinkets. Typically melee don't have much to worry about, but casters, this is worth a read.

The RPPM thing is generally loathed in the community. They took lesser procs with dependable proc timers and gave us huge procs with random proc timers. They have created the very issue they are trying to correct, which is the massive burst and big openers from classes. There's some confusion on this and I'd like to clear it up a bit. I wish I could do this on the official Blizzard forums, but people only go there to bitch, whine, complain, and ask really stupid questions.

Basically people complained about their procs randomly happening at the beginning of a fight. DPS would see variances in their opener as high as 200-300k. Personally, when I didn't get a Perfect Aim proc during Lei Shen progression, it made a big enough difference that we'd see a Thunderstruck just before transitioning whereas if I got my procs, my DPS was 100-150k higher and we didn't have to deal with that element. Blizzard implemented a formula protection that would make sure you'd get procs even with horrible RNG. They did this with a formula based around the time since your last proc. It's been a general trend now that people have learned about this and have adapted. DPS with low RPPM trinkets and powerful procs didn't release knowing that when you change zones, this timer resets. By being out of combat for 5 minutes, people with trinkets like Unerring Vision of Lei Shen had over a 95% chance to proc their trinket at the beginning of combat. If they released, ran back, and pulled and only had around 2 minutes of wait time, their proc chance was cut to approximately 30%.

Because players have adapted to what Blizzard has set up, our openers have gotten out of control. They've put in a system, and we've figured out how to manipulate it to our best possible means. In our openers, we already have Tailoring/Engineering/Herbalism procs to go with our potions, racials, personal CDs, and now two crazy good trinkets. Theorycrafters and high-end players find ways to adjust their openers to maximize DPS and they share that with others. The trend with player skill has been increasing as time goes on, and this enhances what Blizz has tried to do to protect their RPPM trinket idea. As an Orc Demonology Warlock with Tailoring, when I open up, I've got Blood Fury (2k SP), Lightweave (~1.5k SP), a potion (4k SP), Dark Soul (18k Mastery), Tempus Repit (30% Haste), Bloodlust (30% Haste), Stormlash Totem (+500k damage), Perfect Aim (100% Crit chance), and Breath of Many Minds (8.5k SP). Any of you that use Affdots will know the effect of this when they apply Doom under all these conditions. 30 seconds into the fight, your Affdots Doom number will be somewhere around 20. That means the Doom you applied under all of those conditions was approximately 5x as powerful as the one you sit at without all those procs. Same sort of situation arises with Destruction using Breath of the Hydra and Wushoolay's, except this moment of Destruction (pun intended) comes at approximately T = 16. 16 seconds into the fight, you should have Dark Soul up along with your Breath of the Hydra proc (8.5k SP) and an 8-9 stack of Wushoolay (12-14k SP). My unbuffed Chaos Bolts hit for about 400-430k. When these two trinkets align with a potion, I've seen Chaos Bolts in the 1.3M range with no other modifiers. I went into LFR to test something on Jin'rokh...I waited 15 seconds before starting combat. I got this scenario while standing in a puddle. 2,143,553 Chaos Bolt. Imagine seeing these procs line up on Horridon after he's bashed 4 doors. Oh, and for shits and giggles, just Havoc that over to Jarok.

What this 90 second timer will do is make it so that our trinkets will have a significantly lower chance to proc when combat starts. However, as time goes in combat without a proc, our proc rate multiplier increases greatly. So regardless of how much time you've had since your last proc, it will always be 90 seconds according to your internal timer. RPPM trinkets for melee typically have a high RPPM factor. I think the one off of Primordius is aroudn 3.00. However, Breath and UVLS have an RPPM factor of 0.525. Wush's is 0.588, and Cha-Ye's is 0.81 * (1+your crit chance). Remember, Cha-Ye's has half the duration of Breath, hence the higher proc modifier. Cha-Ye's will have approximately twice the chance to proc at the beginning of a fight than Breath or Unerring. There will be no more 'baseline opener' for specs anymore, because you'll want to time your most powerful abilities when your trinkets are live and that will be much more random than it is now.

The protection formula is very clunky and confusing. The main gyst of it is that your trinket will have an increased chance to proc at around 1.5 times the expected proc rate. Remember, you can calculate expected proc rate using the formula I list on the first page. For my Haste level of 29.5% in raid, the expected proc rate of my 543 Unerring Vision of Lei Shen is 0.525 * 1.295 * 1.15 = 0.782. This converts to an average proc rate of 76.7 seconds. At 1.5x this, I will get a proc modifier greatly increasing my chance to proc. Every 1% of the expected proc rate (EPR), your proc chance goes up 3%. The math looks somewhat like this:

76.7 sec = average proc rate

153.4 sec = bonus proc rate start

From 153.4 sec, every 0.767 seconds, my proc rate goes up 3%. In live data, I've witnessed proc intervals of 3:00 maximized out several times. Basically, the very worst you could ever get is your trinket not proccing until this proc reaches 100%. This would occur 33.3x your average proc rate, or in my case, 153.4 + (33.3 * 0.767) = 178.94 seconds. Notice that this translates to 2:58.94 which is as close as you can get timewise to the 3:00 I've seen in logs. This means that to get a guaranteed Unerring proc, your raid would need to wait 3:00 after your last proc wtih a 543 ilvl (adjust to find your own value based on Haste and ilvl).

Now, the bad news. You can see that my average proc rate, at 543 ilvl with 30% Haste, gives me the bonus proc rate start time of 153.4 seconds. This is a bit higher than Blizzard's new standard 90 seconds. What does this mean? You will have no more of a chance to proc your trinket at the start of a fight than you would any normal period of time in combat ranging over a 153.4 second window. Under the worst conditions, note that you could not see a proc until 178.94 - 90 = 88.94 seconds into the fight. Yes, with a Heroic 543 Unerring, it could take almost a minute and a half to proc Perfect Aim. These values are similar for Wushoolay's and Breath of the Hydra.

What does it mean? If this goes live, you won't be banking on guaranteed crits. The value of Unerring for Demo plummets. The value of all the trinkets plummet for planned openers. HOPEFULLY Blizzard just gives us ICD trinkets like we had in MSV and HoF. They were much more manageable and didn't break the system. If we're forced to continue to deal with RPPM trinkets on top of this new system, you can kiss your 500k+ openers goodbye unless you get EXTREMELY lucky.